Practice question · True or false
Cultural relativism is a method for understanding a practice, and it leaves the anthropologist free to criticise it.
Hints
- Is relativism a description or a moral rule?
- Understanding first, judgement after.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Methodological relativism asks you to suspend judgement long enough to understand a practice on its own terms; it does not oblige you to approve of it. Conflating it with moral relativism, the claim that no practice can be criticised, is the standard misreading, and it is one anthropologists working on female genital cutting or caste have had to answer directly.
Practise Culture and Cultural Relativism
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